The Manchester Area Agreement Bulletin

May 2008 - Issue 2

Welcome to the second Manchester Multi-Area Agreement (MAA) bulletin. As the pace of the MAA proposal gathers momentum we will be producing this bulletin every two weeks to keep colleagues up to date with the developments.

This issue highlights the latest big building blocks; the key performance indicators as well as the deadlines the MAA Team is working towards in order to submit the application to Whitehall.

Mike Emmerich, Chief Executive

Core team update

Drew Thomas, Deputy Chief Executive Manchester Solutions Group, was appointed as joint Project Director along with Paul Thomas to manage the Skills and Employment agenda. This was a temporary measure and Drew has now withdrawn from this role.

Nick Gerrard, Deputy Chief Executive Manchester Enterprises and Baron Frankal, Director of Strategy and Research, Manchester Enterprises have been playing key roles in the Core team. Nick assists in providing overall leadership and challenge and Baron is lead on indicators, targets and financial incentives.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Locked away somewhere in the basement of Churchgate House, in semi-permanent communication with the project teams and other interested parties, a crack squad has been toiling away to work through the issues in producing a robust and MAA-relevant series of high-level key performance indicators (KPIs). These are designed to pick up significant gains in Manchester’s economic performance built on the back of a successful MAA and are the basis on which that success or otherwise will be judged.

The eleven KPIs include GVA, employment, the proportion of Level 2 & Level 4 qualifieds, new homes and congestion. The KPIs, which are currently out to consultation, use a baseline of 1 January 2007 and provide annual targets through to 2012. They are built from a "business as usual" starting point (based on past trends), which is then overlaid with the added benefits policy-makers feel the MAA will bring. The higher the targets, the more the stretch Manchester is committing to achieving, and the more short-term cost implications there will be. A full table, including the targets, will be published in the next version of this Bulletin.

In addition, work is ongoing to finalise a series of performance monitoring indicators that will feature in the different thematic sections of the MAA (such as employment and skills) as output indicators. As the MAA is essentially built on output legitimacy, these will also be very important ! All MAA indicators must be methodologically robust and they are designed specifically to illustrate developments over time across the sub-region as a single entity (so not for spatial comparison) and to pick up on elements that a successful MAA, and enhanced sub-regional co-operation generally, will specifically bring added value to, so screening out, to the degree possible, outputs where the determinant levers lie predominantly at local, regional or national level.

The Latest MAA Big Building Blocks

Timescales

The pressure is on for the final document to be submitted to Government early June 2008.

In order to meet this tight deadline the document will be drafted by the core team over the next few weeks with the aim of it being circulated to the Chief Executives of the ten Local authorities, AGMA Executive and stakeholders for consultation in good time for their responses to be incorporated into the final document.

Outline Timetable

If you require further information on anything covered in this bulletin please contact Liz Reuben, Head of Communications on 0161 237 4179 or email liz.reuben@manchester-enterprises.co.uk